Tag Archives: browser

Confetti is a compelling report that shows you in high definition where individual clicks are happening on your web pages with colored-coded dots. Being able to visually see where your visitors are clicking can tell you a lot about your web page’s design and how it’s helping (or hurting) your goals and conversions. Metrics Selector In the upper-left corner of the Confetti Report, you’ll see our Metrics Selector. By clicking on the metrics in the legend, you can switch between: Search terms Day of week Time of click Browser …and 16 other metrics! Being able to segment your Confetti Report…

Earlier this year, support for CSS grid layout landed in most major desktop browsers. Naturally, the specification is one of the hot topics at meet-ups and conferences. After having some conversations about grid and progressive enhancement, I believe that there’s a good amount of uncertainty about using it. I heard some quite interesting questions and statements, which I want to address in this post.

“When can I start using CSS grid layout?” “Too bad that it’ll take some more years before we can use grid in production.” “Do I need Modernizr in order to make websites with CSS grid layout?” “If I wanted to use grid today, I’d have to build two to three versions of my website.” The CSS grid layout module is one of the most exciting developments since responsive design. We should try to get the best out of it as soon as possible, if it makes sense for us and our projects.

In today’s article, we’ll create a JavaScript extension that works in all major modern browsers, using the very same code base. Indeed, the Chrome extension model based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript is now available almost everywhere, and there is even a Browser Extension Community Group working on a standard.

I’ll explain how you can install this extension that supports the web extension model (i.e. Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave and Vivaldi), and provide some simple tips on how to get a unique code base for all of them, but also how to debug in each browser.

Chances are pretty good that you’ve worked with, or at least understand the concept of, server compression. By compressing website assets on the server prior to transferring them to the browser, we’ve been able to achieve substantial performance gains.

For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, you’ll get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and we’ll compare its performance to gzip.

Every smart marketer on the planet gets just how important data is in marketing.

But answer me these questions, and answer them honestly: Do you know how to analyze your marketing data? Do you know how to use your analyses to improve your results?

During his presentation at Call To Action Conference, co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina, revealed that many data-driven marketers are not getting any value from their analytics. They tend to admire data charts rather than analyze the data and act on it. Unfortunately,

Pretty charts don’t actually do anything for you unless you take action.

Crap. Who else thought that looking at a few neat graphs in Google Analytics was enough?

Analyzing data can be as easy as 1 2 3

To increase traffic and conversions, marketers need to know how to interpret their own data and turn data insights into action. Andy debunked the myth that you’ve got to be Einstein to analyze your data. This is jolly good news for those of us who break out in cold sweats at the mere thought of number crunching.

He laid out a fool-proof three-step approach to help marketers analyze their own data and turn their analyses into action. It involves using the ever-trendy (but actually invaluable when you know how to use them) Google Analytics reports: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion.

Here is said approach:

1. Turn ideas into questions

What do you want to find out?

2. Find answers

Look for a report that can help you validate or reject the idea.

3. Take action

Take what you’ve learned and use it to optimize your marketing results.

By using these simple but effective steps, you can find the answers in Google Analytics to some of your most pressing marketing questions. You’re going to learn how to decrease bounce rate, rank higher in Google, boost reader engagement and increase conversions. Trust me, this is game-changing stuff.

Make sure you’re logged into Google Analytics and on the Reporting page. Let’s do this!

Audience reports

Google Analytics Audience reports don’t just tell you who your users are, they also show you how sticky your website is. If you want to find out how well your website is working across various devices and browsers, this report is your new best friend.

Example: How to decrease your bounce rate using Audience reports

Sometimes bouncier can mean better, but this is definitely not the case in marketing. If you have a high bounce rate (whether on your website or blog), then it’s likely that your content isn’t very relevant or user-friendly.

For smart marketers, the aim of the game should be to get bounce rates as low as humanly possible.

Using Google Analytics Audience reports, Andy shows us how to find out our website’s bounce rate across different browsers.

1. Ask a question

“Is your website working well in every browser?”

2. Find the answer

Click on Audience reports > Technology > Browser & OS. This will give you an overview of the bounce rates for users of every browser.

All these numbers look pretty similar. So now what? Let’s go one step further by clicking on the Comparison view. This option pitches the site average for bounce rates for each browser against each other to give you a clearer picture of which browsers your website is working on.

Bingo! It seems the poor souls visiting Andy’s website from an Android or Opera browser were having a particularly tough time. Which browsers have the highest bounce rate on your website?

3. Take action

Don’t stop now that you’ve identified any problem areas. It’s time to take cold, hard, remedial action. Why are the bounce rates for users or certain browsers higher than others? What can you do to find out? Simple. You can start by testing your website pages on these browsers to see why people aren’t sticking around on your site. You could check out page loading time, browser responsiveness and usability. And then, if necessary, optimize your pages for these browsers.

Acquisition reports

In other words, where are your website visitors coming from? Are they arriving at your website via Twitter or Facebook, or are they landing on your pages directly from Google? An Acquisition report gives you a detailed view of your traffic sources, so you can work out where you need to ramp up your marketing efforts.

Example: How to rank higher in Google using Acquisition reports

For Andy, people who arrive on your website through search engines are much more likely to convert than those who reach you via social networks. In fact:

Search traffic converts into leads 600% more than social traffic.

Holy cow. So when your goal is to drive conversions, focus on optimizing your website for search engines rather than driving traffic from social media. Andy suggests that you can creep up the search engine ladder by finding out how you currently fare in Google and turning your findings into action.

Sneaky.

1. Ask a question

“What phrases are we ranking for?”

2. Find the answer

If you haven’t already, activate Search Console in your Google Analytics settings. Then go to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries. You will not only get a list of all the phrases you rank for (under Query), but also how highly you rank for them in Google (under Average Position).

Andy recommends that to be even more cunning, you should find the phrases you rank for on page 2 of Google.

It’s not that hard to move up a tiny bit in your rankings. If a tiny bit means going from page 2 to page 1, trust me you’re going to quadruple traffic next week for that page.

Do this by adding an advanced filter. Select Include > Average Position > Greater than and enter the value of 10.

These are Andy’s results:

What about yours?

3. Take action

Now it’s time for you to search for these phrases in Google, confirm the rankings and see which web pages you’re dealing with. It’s down to you to improve these pages to push them further up the Google ranks. You could for example create longer pages, add more detail or add video. If you’re short on ideas, Hubspot gives you a few in a post on how to improve your website’s user experience.

Behavior Reports

These reports show marketers what people are looking for, engaging with and doing on their websites.

Example: How to boost reader engagement using Behavior reports

It’s every content marketer’s dream to create content that people want to engage with. Andy kindly shows us all how to use the Behavior reports to find out which of our blog posts people love the most.

1. Ask a question

“Which of your blog posts are the most engaging?”

2. Find the answer

Go to Behavior > Site Content > All pages.

Search for “/blog” in the filter field to view posts on your blog page only. Then organize the results by the Comparison view.

Select “Avg. time on page” from the drop-down list in the third column. This shows you which blog posts your readers are engaging with most compared to the site average.

Look for similarities between the most engaging posts. Do they talk about the same subject? Are they the same type of post (e.g., a how-to or a guide)? In the example, the posts with the highest engagement all cover Google Analytics. Hey, what a marvellous topic for a blog article!

3. Take action

The actions are pretty obvious. Once you know which posts your readers dig, you need to deliver more of the good stuff. Invest some time in promoting these posts. Create and publish more content on the same or related subjects.

Conversion Reports

If a marketer’s ultimate goal isn’t to convert, then what is? Conversion reports give you valuable insights into which of your website pages or posts push people to convert. It may not be rocket science. But it certainly is pure 24 carat marketing gold.

1. Ask a question

2. Find the answer

Go to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path. This shows you which pages your converters were looking at before they completed an action, or goal.

Select the goal from the “All goals” drop-down list. In the example, Andy selects “Newsletter subscribers”.

This shows you which pages people were on before subscribing to the newsletter. Now click on “advanced” to add a filter:

And then filter as so:

Voilà! A list of the blog posts your visitors were reading before subscribing to your newsletter.

3. Take action

With this valuable info under your belt, you can now focus your efforts on driving traffic to the posts that convert the most visitors. Andy recommends promoting these posts using social media, email or even showcasing them on your website’s home page. You could also publish more content on your highest converting topics.

From passive marketing to active marketing

There we have it. A whole host of great examples — based on asking questions, finding answers and taking action — that we can all use to perform our very own analyses and improve the results of our marketing efforts.

Andy taught us that analyzing our own marketing data is fundamental to improving our marketing results and that anyone — dataphile or dataphobe — can do their own seriously valuable data analysis. All you need is a Google Analytics account and a no-nonsense approach.

As for the most valuable takeaway of them all? Inspiring marketers to not only act on their data, but also to adopt a culture of analysis, reflection and experimentation. Now you’ve got the tools you need to become an active data-driven marketer, the rest is down to you.

So, what do we have this week? Well, it’s quite a lot actually. For example, there’s now a deal that might make Opera’s browser a Chinese business, leaving all privacy and security efforts that have recently been made in the browser uncertain.

If you want to dive into learning ECMAScript 6, Wes Bos has published a huge series of ES6 screencasts this week that are absolutely worth the money. Besides, there are a few other recommendations for you to read this week. Let’s get started.

For some time, we’ve run up against the limits of what CSS can do. Those who build responsive layouts will freely admit the frustrations and shortcomings of CSS that force us to reach for CSS preprocessors, plugins and other tools to help us write the styles that we’re unable to write with CSS alone. Even still, we run into limitations with what current tools help us accomplish.

Think for a moment of a physical structure. If you’re building a large edifice with weak material, a lot of external support is required to hold it together, and things have to be overbuilt to stay sturdy. When you’re building a website out of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this external support might look like frameworks, plugins, preprocessors, transpilers, editing tools, package managers and build processes.

Do you like challenges? Are you willing to take on a task that you’ve never come across before, and do it under a deadline? What if, in carrying out the task, you encounter a problem that appears unsolvable? I want to share my experience of using CSS 3D effects for the first time in a real project and to inspire you to take on challenges.

It was an ordinary day when Eugene, a manager at CreativePeople, wrote to me. He sent me a video and explained that he was developing a concept for a new project and was wondering if it was possible for me to develop something like what was in the video.

This photo is called “Split second before motorcycle crash” — no joke. Image via Skitterphoto.

The creative is stellar.

Headline and value prop impactful. Hero image delightful.

But peeps ain’t converting.

Because the single biggest conversion killer is lurking behind the scenes, completely untouched.

Which is a shame, because speed (or lack thereof) often has a bigger impact on campaign conversions than any of that other stuff.

The impact of speed

Google experienced a 20% traffic drop years ago as a result of a 0.5 second delay — 0.5!

Think that’s bad? If an ecommerce page fails to load in under 3 seconds, it stands to lose nearly half its traffic. As a result, some of the savviest online brands now load in under a second. Less than one second!

The impact of speed only becomes exacerbated on mobile, where limited processing power and spotty connections are the norm. According to Kinsta’s excellent page speed guide, 74% of people on mobile would abandon if the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds.

1. Clean up your code

Reducing the size of site files, especially front-end ones, can have a big impact. Even small issues like excess spaces, indentations, line breaks and superfluous tags can hurt your page load time.

JavaScript is fun. It allows you add little details, like that funny snake or tail that follows a user’s mouse pointer around the screen. Clever! (Sarcasm!) Often, though, JavaScript can be overkill on a landing page. Same with Ajax and other similar extravagances.

Instead, KISS. If you focus on simplicity, there’s (almost) no need for extra stuff.

But if you’re dead-set on keeping your precious scripts (read that in your best Gollum/Sméagol voice), at least load your above-the-fold content first, which is Google’s recommended method.

Find out how your page’s JavaScript is loading with Varvy’s handy JavaScript Usage Tool, and then work on optimizing.

2. Minify HTML & CSS

Jumping on the reducing requests bandwagon, minifying HTML and CSS will help you to package and deliver page data in the most streamlined way possible.

Admittedly, we’re getting out of my comfort zone here. If you’re confident in your technical ability, check out this helpful article. Otherwise open up Google’s PageSpeed Insights, drop in your URL and then send the results to a trusted developer.

3. Utilize GZIP compression

GZIP compression deals with content encoding to again minimize server requests made by your browser. Ouch — that sentence made my brain hurt.

Use GIDNetwork to see what the current compression on your site looks like now, as well as to get a few ideas of how it could be improved. (Insert helpful developer here.)

4. Minimize redirects

301 redirects are a standard SEO-friendly practice used to tell both search engines and visitors that a page has permanently moved to a new location. It’s a common best practice used when campaigns and sites evolve or change over time, and can help you cut down on broken links or 404 errors.

Trouble is, too many redirects can also negatively impact speed. So the question is: How many? In typical fashion, Google’s answer is vague — they simply suggest minimizing or trying to eliminate them all together, because they cause extra network trips to verify data (which can be a killer on mobile devices especially).

Screaming Frog can help by quickly identifying all of the redirects currently on your site. In the example below, we found a little over 14% of Runnersworld.com pages contain a redirect. Ouch.

How do you get a frog to scream? Toad-al up your redirects.

The key is to dig deeper. What types of redirects are you seeing and why? What are they trying to accomplish? Looking at the example above, there seems to be a lot of temporary 302 redirects from social sharing platforms that can probably be cleaned up to avoid slowing page speed. Here’s a detailed guide from Varvy for more.

5. Relocate scripts

Believe it or not, even script placement can affect load times.

For example, if your tracking scripts are located above the fold or in the <head> of your landing page, your browser will have to download and deal with those scripts before getting to the stuff people actually come to see (like the page content).

It should also go without saying that having duplicate scripts (which is pretty common when multiple people are working on the same page) will slow things down a bit.

And do you really need five analytics packages on that landing page? Probably not. Like most things you’ve read so far, simplify and minimize to reduce the back-and-forth between browsers and servers.

6. Limit WordPress plugins

“Easy.” you say. “Obvious!” you exclaim.

If it’s really so easy, then open up WordPress right now and look at how many plugins your team has installed for simple things like social sharing or tracking. Things that can — and should — be done by a professional so you can completely avoid having to install these plugins in the first place.

The problem is: taking a bunch of third-party tools built by different people and shoehorning them into a Frankenstein-esque page is a recipe for disaster.

If you’d like to diagnose which plugins are worth keeping and which need to be deactivated immediately, you’re not going to like the answer… add another plugin!

P3 (or the Plugin Performance Profiler) will measure your site’s plugin performance and measure their impact on load times. At least you can rest assured knowing that this one will serve some utility while it’s installed.

7. Upgrade hosting

If you have plans to someday make money from your website (so probably everyone reading this blog), paying $3 per month for Godaddy hosting is not going to cut it.

One big reason is that many cheap hosting solutions are shared, meaning you’re sharing server space with many other sites (whose own performance might drag down yours).

That might also mean limited control over what you’re able to affect or change to improve things like site speed. This is especially true for ecommerce sites, which can experience sudden traffic jumps and contain many large media files. Simply put, hosting can make or break your campaign.

If you’re less sure of what you’re doing or would simply like to not worry about it, a managed hosting option is preferable. This is especially true for WordPress websites — besides speed improvements you’re also getting extra security against external threats plus backups for internal mistakes. The aforementioned Kinsta, WP Engine and Pagely are some of the most popular choices.

8. Resize images

Death, taxes and people not resizing images before uploading them. These are universal truths you can always count on. Also, Mashable publishing terrible articles.

Tweet “Death, taxes & people not resizing images before uploading them. These are universal truths you can always count on.”

Asking browsers to automatically squeeze your original 1200px image down to 600px every time your landing page is loaded, multiplied across all visits for all pages and posts, creates a ton of unnecessary extra work. (Especially on mobile devices with limited processing power and relatively poor connectivity.)

Ideally, resize images before uploading them to the server. If that’s too much work (I ain’t judging, I’m lazy too), at least use WordPress’ built-in tool to resize images for you.

9. Compress images

After resizing your images, the next step should be to compress them to again reduce file size.

This is another often overlooked step, with an infographic from Radware claiming that 45%(!) of the top 100 ecommerce sites don’t compress images.

But optimizing your images can be a low-hanging-fruit approach to quickly speed up loading times, drastically reducing the amount of space — and work — they require.

There are a number of fast, free tools out there, like TinyJPG or Compressor.io, which can significantly reduce file size. The test seen below using Compressor.io resulted in a 73% reduction! Multiply that across all of your landing page images and we’re talking serious results.

10. Deliver Images with a CDN

See a pattern here yet?

Delivering images with a Content Delivery Network (or CDN) is like calling in reinforcements from servers located closer to your site’s visitors. That means it will try to use the closest ones first, using every trick in the book to cut down on the time and effort required to deliver content from server to a user’s browser.

Popular ones like CloudFlare and MaxCDN can drastically improve performance on highly visual sites.

Image via Cloudflare.

11. External Hosting

Another prudent option is to move large files, like images, audio or video, off of your servers entirely and use an external hosting platform like Imgur for images or Wistia for videos.

While we’ve beat the importance of image size to a metaphorical death already, bigger files like audio and video should almost always be hosted externally.

That’s critical, because rich media adoption is immense. It’s predicted that a whopping 74% of internet traffic in 2017 will be video.

Beyond the performance issues, external hosting providers also offer additional benefits like increased audience reach or features that increase interactions and conversions. Wistia founder Chris Savage lays out a few more reasons why external hosting is a good idea, if you’re interested.

Conclusion

74% of people would leave a site if it doesn’t load within 5 seconds. Which means that even if you’re leveraging all the best practices in the world to get those conversions, people won’t stick around long enough to actually see any of it.

Page speed improvements can range from the basic (upgrading your hosting and removing unnecessary plugins) to the more advanced (minifying files). But anything is certainly better than nothing. Even paying extra attention to how you’re uploading images can go a long way to improving performance.

Yes, implementing all of these changes will be a time-consuming process. No doubt. But it’s also the best way to give your landing pages a fighting chance to convert visitors.

Responsive images have been around long enough for most of us to have taken them for a spin, or at least to have learned from the experiences of those who have. Beyond doubt, the responsive images specification is a great win for the web. However, quite a few reports from the front lines suggest that responsive images can become pretty ugly.

The good news is that there is a fix! No, not throwing JavaScript at the challenge, but by asking the web server for a helping hand. Enter Client Hints, an initiative spearheaded by Google that is already available in browsers (Chrome and Opera) and that is super-simple to use. Let’s see how Client Hints can reduce both image size and verbosity of the responsive images markup.